Steve Siegel
July 6th, 2012, 05:52 PM
There it was. A photo of a large crowd of people standing on a subway platform. The faces of the people in front, talking, laughing, reading newspapers were all in focus. But so were those way in the back. They looked smaller, of course, but you could tell exactly what they were doing. Everybody was in focus.
This was new to me. The caption said it was done by “focus stacking”. You shoot various distances into the scene, focus at each distance, then trim and combine them all in Photoshop to make a focused panorama. Macro photographers do it all the time with flies and such, where the depth of field is like a millimeter.
Would this work in video? I didn’t know, and if this is old news to the UWOL community, please forgive me for sounding like a kid with a new toy. Maybe it will be new to one or two of you. I know that lots of UWOLers use a similar technique shooting time-lapse cloud scenes, to keep the ground movement from looking sped up, but this is a little different.
The short answer is yes, focus stacking does work, but there are major constraints on how and when you can use it. I have posted a complete description of the technique on my blog Birds Unwrapped (http://birdsunwrapped.blogspot.com/) if anyone wants to look.
The other problem was to get a “how-to” video to fit Lorinda’s Forces of Nature theme. I had planned to do this film since UWOL 22, and was going to…one way or the other. As it did for me once before, mathematics came to the rescue. There is more to the forces of Nature than just volcanoes, hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires and avalanches. Natural forces act upon us constantly, from dropping a plate on the floor, to driving your car, to seeing the light reflected from a work of art. Each of these natural events is described by its own set of equations. Indeed, anything that happens in the world is controlled by a Force of Nature…even focusing a camera.
This was new to me. The caption said it was done by “focus stacking”. You shoot various distances into the scene, focus at each distance, then trim and combine them all in Photoshop to make a focused panorama. Macro photographers do it all the time with flies and such, where the depth of field is like a millimeter.
Would this work in video? I didn’t know, and if this is old news to the UWOL community, please forgive me for sounding like a kid with a new toy. Maybe it will be new to one or two of you. I know that lots of UWOLers use a similar technique shooting time-lapse cloud scenes, to keep the ground movement from looking sped up, but this is a little different.
The short answer is yes, focus stacking does work, but there are major constraints on how and when you can use it. I have posted a complete description of the technique on my blog Birds Unwrapped (http://birdsunwrapped.blogspot.com/) if anyone wants to look.
The other problem was to get a “how-to” video to fit Lorinda’s Forces of Nature theme. I had planned to do this film since UWOL 22, and was going to…one way or the other. As it did for me once before, mathematics came to the rescue. There is more to the forces of Nature than just volcanoes, hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires and avalanches. Natural forces act upon us constantly, from dropping a plate on the floor, to driving your car, to seeing the light reflected from a work of art. Each of these natural events is described by its own set of equations. Indeed, anything that happens in the world is controlled by a Force of Nature…even focusing a camera.